Editor's Note: This is the first in a continuing series of articles to be written with coaches in mind. We will cover management of the team page, roster management, schedule management, and results analysis. Once the series is done, I'll group all these articles under a coaches how-to-do-it series and put an umbrella article with links to all installments on the front page. I'll do that again at roughly the beginning of the track and field season. It's my hope that this makes everyone's job a little easier.
Claiming Your Team Page
You can't do anything with your team page until you've claimed your team page. So, the first thing to do is to claim the page.
You do this by clicking on Teams from the main navigation bar, and selecting your team from the list of teams that appears. When you get to your team page, you will notice a black button saying Claim This Team beneath your school name. If you are a coach, please do select to be recognized as a coach, not a team administrator. Click on the Coach link and then fill out the information in the form that appears. If your name is listed as a coach for your team in the CHSAA directory or if you have a recognizable school employee e-mail, you do not need to put a note of explanation for how you would be recognized as a coach; otherwise, just provide a quick explanation.
This Coach status request then appears on my queue of things to deal with. Normally, it's a matter of a couple hours or less before I approve the request, but it could be as much as 24 hours. You will receive an automated e-mail letting you know of the approval.
At that point, you have permission to edit your team page. Log in, go back to your team page, and you will find the black Claim This Team button has been replaced with a Team Manager button. Click on that button to access the back side of your team page. All further instructions in this article will assume you are at the back side of your team page.
Add a Team Logo
One of the first things you may want to do at your team page is to add a school logo to the page. This helps to make your page distinctive to your program.
You will want to find a school logo and, using Photoshop or some other image editing program, resize that logo image to 150x150 pixels. Then save the resized file as a .png or .jpg in some convenient location.
Next, click on the Choose File button near the top of your team page. Locate your file with the file search window that appears, then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the team admin page, and your team logo is updated. If you had a pre-existing team logo, you may have to refresh your team page to get the new one to appear.
Adding Other Team Information
There are text boxes to add or edit various kinds of information about your team. Note that your team name and abbreviation are not editable fields. The team abbreviation is the abbreviation that is used for online registration for all teams during the CHSAA-sanctioned outdoor track and field season. It is very important that this field remains constant.
There is a free-form About Our Team textbox at the bottom of the team admin page. You can enter team history, photographs, links to files (these files will first need to be stored under My Files on your personal profile page - tutorial here), and just about anything else you can imagine here. It can be very short or very long, as suits your team needs.
When you are doing making changes to your team page, simply click on Save Changes and all fields are updated.
Roster Management
In an article coming your way soon!